Pathways to electrification (w/ Ian Shapiro)

Q&A

John Mandyck: In terms of an initiative on readiness to replace when equipment fails, when do you think we can expect to have an adequate line of contractors and equipment ready to respond to the multiple requests in a timely manner? 

Ian Shapiro: I think we need a certification program because the fraction of those failures is actually small, it’s not huge. But I think to get the certification you would need to have some safe oil fired electric space heaters in stock, you need to commit to getting on site within six hours to distribute those heaters, and then you need to have heat pumps in stock that you commit to installing within a week. Something like that.

I think that’s the program we need and I don’t think that’s hard. I think what’s harder is to serve all of the demand for heat pumps because right now it’s nuts to get a heat pump installed in Ithaca, and I’m assuming it’s the same statewide. Unless we do some kind of a workforce development moonshot, I think it’s unfortunately going to be five, ten years before that. It’s one of our biggest bottlenecks. 

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John Mandyck: Do cold climate heat pumps work well enough in upstate New York or rural parts of New York? If so, how do we convince people that’s true? 

Ian Shapiro: Absolutely. It’s simple physics. You just choose the heat pump that’s the right size for your build. And that’s it. We’re DOE climate zone six, New York City’s DOE climate zone four. We’re much colder than New York City. We have hundreds of heat pumps working without any backup, without any problem. They just need to be sized correctly, you don’t want to undersize. You want to size to the energy code.

All of the heat pumps are good in the cold. Some are good to -13°F, a bunch of them are good to -20°F, and we’ve got a new bunch that are good to -30°F. If you’re worried about the issue, just go to Google and find the ones that work down to -30°F. 

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John Mandyck: So the second part of that question was about resiliency, and how to think about safety with blackouts and grid issues. What are your thoughts on that? 

Ian Shapiro: I think they’re valid. I think we need to be aware that you’re going to lose your heating system today if it’s fossil fuel. You’re going to lose any capability to do backup with electric resistance. I think investing in insulation, weatherstripping, and windows is a good idea. Some of the best data I’ve seen on that has come out of Urban Green. You’ve got wonderful reports showing how many days a well-insulated building is survivable because it is warm.

In vulnerable populations, like seniors or disabled people, I think we need backup emergency generators with capacity to handle the heat pumps. They will handle the heat pumps way better than electric resistance, I guarantee you, because the heat pump is for extracting free heat. I think we just need to be honest about ourselves. I think if it’s a vulnerable population, you need to be looking at emergency generators.

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John Mandyck: Next question. What do you think about the need for energy efficiency alongside electrification? Should we be more focused on efficiency while the market and workforce development ramps up for electrification?

Ian Shapiro: I support and I advocate for envelope work. It’s going to help with survivability and resilience. I think it’s a good idea, but we still have not decided what level of envelope work is right. We’re looking at a three legged stool; electrification, conservation and renewables. We haven’t decided what mix is right.

In the olden days, we did everything on the basis of payback. What was the best payback? We’re slowly tiptoeing away from the best payback, but we’re struggling to decide whether a deep energy retrofit, like the Dutch Energiesprong, is the right thing to do. I wrote a report on Energiesprong back in 2017 or something. It’s an exciting program, it’s a valid program, it’s a great program in Holland. It’s a net zero external cladding, deep energy retrofit with solar, with heat pumps.

But it turns out that our climate is very different from Holland. We need air conditioning. They don’t. That changes everything. Our buildings also have a little more insulation than many of their uninsulated buildings, so porting it to New York State has been harder than expected. I don’t know that we have a metric to decide the right combination of envelope and heat.

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John Mandyck: All right, next question. Are heat pump hot water systems having the same implementation issues as heat pumps for space heating and cooling?

Ian Shapiro: Same issues. First of all, we have a huge success story with heat pump water heaters in the basements of single family homes. Hybrid heat pump water heaters have been a dramatic success. I have one in my basement, and I measured its efficiency a few weeks ago and it was delivering a COP of three. It’s delivering fabulous efficiency. I have it running in heat pump only mode in a home with four adults. It’s a 50 gallon water heater, and we have not run out of hot water once in the eight years we’ve had it.

So yes, I think hybrid heat pump water heaters in single family basements have been a huge success. We’re starting to see them in multifamily. We don’t have quite as many products available. There were some on the market, then the offshore manufacturers decided to stop selling them, now they’re bringing them back again. We don’t have a huge selection, but we do have products and it’s ready to go. Installing them is hugely simple, you just replace the heater down in the basement. That’s it. So I think hot water heating, we’re still getting kind of getting used to the products, but I think we’re ready to go. I’d like to see more product selection, but there are products out there.

None of that answered the question. We’d like to see incentives and we’d like to see more workforce, but if you’re trying to decide what to do, I would do hot water first. Whether it’s single family, multifamily, certain commercial buildings, or hotels, I would definitely dip your toe in. Pull it out of your central boiler system and take care of hot water first.

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John Mandyck: All right. Next question is from our friend Dick Lee who wants to know about cost sharing. He was thinking about electrifying apartment heat years ago, he thought that having the resident pay would be a strong driver against waste. Would you expand on the issue of paying for air conditioning, for what’s coming, what’s in store, and possibly how different housing markets could approach both heat and air conditioner from a “who pays” standpoint?

Ian Shapiro: Okay, I’ll start with the general master-meter versus direct. I’ll go out on a limb and I’ll make a case that I’ve made a few times; we should not be scared of master-meter. It’s totally fine to throw everything on the owner’s meter. There’s benefits to individual, but I want to make a case for master. When its master-metered, the owner is paying the bill, and the owner has an incentive then to maintain the heat pump, to maintain the building, to add insulation, and to get renewables. The owner has an incentive. What is that incentive ultimately for the owner? What is the elasticity? The elasticity is 100% of the energy use of that building. That’s what’s in it for the owner if they’re paying the bill. What’s the elasticity for a resident? They can turn the temperature down and put on a sweater. They can’t maintain the equipment other than clean the filter, they can’t replace the equipment, they can’t insulate the building, they can’t change the windows. Their elasticity is about 5 or 10%. If there are real slob, it might be 20%. That’s it.

We have good temperature monitoring data for years of data from NYSERDA programs that show that overheating in New York City is a problem, but it’s the exception. There’s a lot of 72 degrees, 73 degrees stuff, but 80 degrees, you know, where the tenants are wearing shorts and the windows are open. It hurts us to see it. Every time we see a window open in winter, it hurts us. It rubs us the wrong way. But it’s in fact the exception to the rule. And so I want to make the case that there’s a lot to be said for master-metered with some incentives and some limits put on temperature limiting thermostats. That’s the case I’m making for master-meter. Now, I realize that some people just cannot live with that and they just cannot trust tenants, and so direct-meter works fine.

In the case of air conditioning where we’ve gone master-metered, but we’re trying to deal with this issue of the landlord now paying for the air conditioning. There’s multiple solutions. There’s one solution that people are doing where they’re providing two power supplies to the heat pump, and in the summer time they switched the power supply over. I’m not crazy about it. It can be done legally in compliance with the national electric code. I don’t think it’s that safe. I think there’s a chance that a service technician is going to come, they’re going to cut one power supply and not cut the other one, and they’re going to work on live equipment. We’re going to need all kinds of warning signs or extra switches. I’m not crazy about construction costs and I’m not crazy about safety. There are other solutions. We’ve listed several of them on the HPD pilot website.

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John Mandyck: We’re getting close to the end, so I’m going to start to group some of these questions. There’s a lot of questions around grid readiness for electrification. From your perspective statewide, what should we be concerned about grid readiness when it comes to electrification?

Ian Shapiro: We should and I think we’re doing all the right things. First of all, we’re a summer peaking state, so this issue is not a 2023 issue. What is a 2023 issue is we need to get going with electrifying and decarbonizing, but grid readiness is not a 2023 issue. It’s going to be a few years before we hit our grid capacity, and that we’ve become winter. We’re doing all the right things.

I’m seeing products being rolled out that I’m super excited about. First of all, domestic hot water. We’re already doing thermal storage. I’d like to see us outlaw electric resistance backup for water heaters. We don’t need them. If you size the tank the right size that will reduce the power draw for water heaters relative to electric resistance.

I saw a product come out, an induction stove with a battery in it. What a brilliant idea. 110V and it stores energy to use to cook your food, so you don’t need a 50 amp circuit breaker. You don’t need to upgrade your electrical panel. I’m already seeing great activity around grid readiness. I think we’re doing all the right things, so it’s not my biggest concern.

John Mandyck: Great. I’ll just put a plug for Urban Green’s Grid Ready Report for the audience to take a look at on our website. We modeled all 1 million buildings in New York City against the kind of grid to answer this question. At the high level, what we find is there’s a 42% differential between the summer peak and the winter peak in New York City. That means there’s 42% headroom to start plugging things into the grid from a heat perspective. So, to echo Ian’s point, there’s plenty of time before we need to think about master grid issues overall.

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John Mandyck: What’s the largest challenge associated with routing the condensate into the air stream for the window heat pumps? Can it not be done similar to window room air conditioner systems?

Ian Shapiro: It’s hard because in the summer, we just spray it on the outdoor heat exchanger and it evaporates. Perfect. It’s easy. It increases the efficiency of the air conditioner. In the winter it’s the indoor heat exchanger that is hot. I am totally fine taking this distilled water and putting it on the inside. I have no problem with that. It’ll humidify the indoors, it’ll work well, and it’ll increase the efficiency of the heat pump. Somebody is going to come along and scream mold, somebody is going to scream indoor air quality, and then the whole thing’s going to grind to a halt. So I don’t have any problem dropping it on the indoor heat exchanger, but I think there is reluctance to do that.

Now we need to spray it into the cold outdoor air spray and I think people are starting to give that thought. I think dripping it outdoors down a pipe might actually work, but we need to prove it to make sure it doesn’t freeze. That may work and it may be super easy, but it’s no longer something that a homeowner can do picking up the unit from Best Buy. That’s the home run we’re looking for, right? And we can always drain it indoors. NYCHA said we don’t want to do that, we don’t want to deal with this mess, we don’t want to deal with drilling holes in walls or floors. Let’s go out the window.

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John Mandyck: Okay, final question here. What are the common hiccups that occur during key pump installation and early operation?

Ian Shapiro: Early operation. I’ll tell you an experience I had. I electrified a little duplex and the contractor forgot to run power to the new electric stove. We turned the whole system on and that night I got a call from the tenants, “I can’t cook, my stove doesn’t work,” so I had to call a contractor and say you forgot to pick up power to the stove. Then, about a year later, a tenant in a small bedroom and I decided to put in a short strip of electric resistance heat because there were some stairs and it was hard to reach. That tenant called me up a year later saying, “my bedroom is cold”. We went and looked at it, and the contractor forgot to cut power to that heater. I was in the basement looking at some old equipment, and I saw that the gas pipe that had come to the old boiler wasn’t capped. They had shut the gas pipe off the gas valve, but they hadn’t capped the gas pipe. What that means was that if some child came along and opened that gas valve, that house would have exploded.

These are some of the hiccups we’re looking at. There is importance around quality control. We’re seeing pipe penetrations, refrigerant pipe penetrations, coming through walls that aren’t sealed that happened also at that house. These are the hiccups we’re seeing, just quality control issues. We all will work them out, but they’re a pain in the butt.